Bloody Elbow February 2009 MMA Meta-Rankings: Light Heavyweight

Commentary by Kid Nate: After his impressive KO win over #10 Thiago Silva, #3 Lyoto Machida has risen back to #3, passing former champ Forrest Griffin who slides down to #4. Machida will still have to wait for a title shot because #2 Quinton "Rampage" Jackson is in front of him.

Complicating things further, Rampage has to fight #7 Keith Jardine first because Rashad Evans wasn't able to be ready in time for UFC 96 in March and Dana White needed a headliner more than he needed a clear Light Heavyweight title picture.

Meanwhile #8 Mauricio "Shogun" Rua rises one position after his very unimpressive win over #24 Mark Coleman at UFC 93. He'll face #5 Chuck Liddell at UFC 97. Both fighters will be in an utter must-win situation. The winner will go from the frying pan to the fire as they're likely to have to face Lyoto Machida before getting a title shot.

#6 Wanderlei Silva is expected to drop down to middleweight after racking up a 2-4 record since 2006. Going into that run his stock was unbelievably high -- I remember after he won in the first round of the final PRIDE Open Class Grand Prix that people were talking about Wandy as the #1 P4P fighter in the world. Boy how things have changed. He still has fans and will be expected to contend at 185lbs.

#12 Dan Henderson will also be going back to middleweight after his UFC 93 win over #14 Rich Franklin. Those two fighters suffer a great deal from being ranked as middleweights by about half the sources we compile.

#9 Antonio Rogerio Nogueira is the highest ranked 205lber outside the UFC after his KO win over #16 Vladimir Matyushenko at the second Affliction show. It seems like #11 Renato "Babalu" Sobral would be the most logical next opponent for him but I doubt they'll fight each other. Babalu would seem to be in the catbird seat at the Strikeforce Light Heavyweight champion and is rumored to be facing EliteXC refugee #22 Rafael "Feijao" Cavalcante at the first Strikeforce show.

NOTE: The Meta-Rankings are not the subjective opinion of the BloodyElbow team, but rather a compilation of the rankings of over twenty leading MMA web sites. It is our opinion that these are the most informative MMA rankings anywhere.

Based on the premise that opinions are like assholes, everybody has one and they all stink. instead of putting up our own subjective fighter rankings, we compile and average the rankings of every source we could find online.

The goal is to show how the MMA community rates the fighters, not to bore you with our opinions.

Be sure and look at the percentage of possible points, they're a much more telling number than the ranking.

A total of 44 fighters were ranked in the top 25 by one source or another, for reasons of sanity I only track the top 25 most highly rated fighters.

25 points are awarded for a first place ranking, 16 for a 10th place ranking, 1 for a 25th place ranking. A formula is used to "normalize" the data so all fighters are awarded points from those lists that do not include a full 25 fighters. Fuller explanation below.

Rankings were compiled from the following 17 sites: 411 Mania, Cage Potato, Fight Matrix, Fight Magazine, Five Ounces of Pain, Inside MMA, MMA 4 Real, MMA ELO, MMA Fighting, MMA on Tap, MMA Playground, MMA Rocks, MMA Weekly, Sherdog, TAGG Radio, Total MMA & WAMMA.

The normalization scheme as explained by JCS of FightMatrix is here:

The "normalization number" (new name) would be:

120
divided by
(Total Fighters Found in Any List minus 10)

Every fighter found somewhere else, but on a Top 10 list would be assigned this number.

The "normalization" number would not apply to a fighter not found on a Top 25 list. They would simply get 0.

So the process would be:

Do all of the Top 25 lists first, #1 = 25, #2 = 24…. #24 = 2, #25 = 1
Do all of the Top 10 lists, same scoring structure.. stops at #10 = 16

Figure out that normalization variable.

Fill in the normalization variable to all fighters not found in the Top 10 lists, but found elsewhere.

Do your totals and rank.